Workshop with Dr. Kristina Lyons

The Concordia Ethnography Lab is happy to invite you to a workshop with Kristina Lyons (UPenn) on January 27 th at 1:00 pm: Rivers and Reconciliation: Elaborating the Sociological Memory of War Through Science and Arts-based practices. 

During this workshop, Dr. Lyons will present an ethnographic and participatory action research project to reconstruct the “socioecological memory” of the Mandur River watershed in the Colombian Amazon. The objective of this project was to create conditions for community dialogues over the territorial ordering, recovery, and conservation of the watershed in the midst of ongoing socio-environmental conflicts. Dr. Lyons will discuss the proposal to engage in what grassroots organizations call “profound reconciliation” along with the ethical stakes of reconciliatory processes that tend to human and more-than-human relations damaged by the interconnected dynamics of structural violence and decades of war. She will also share the environmental humanities-based methodologies that emerged in our collective process to elaborate the memory of the Mandur, as well as facilitate a cosmopolitical exercise to highlight the importance of fostering spaces for bettering (rather than transcending) conflict. We will also converse about the challenges posed for public engaged scholarship during times of transition that may shift toward the perpetuation of violence, injustice, and militarized forms of conservation.

*For more information and questions please email EthnoLab Coordinator Maya Lamothe-Katrapani at mlamothekatrapani@gmail.com

Kristina Lyons is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. She also holds affiliations with the Center for Experimental Ethnography and the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies.  Kristina’s research is situated at the interfaces of socio-ecological conflicts and science and legal studies in Latin America.  Her manuscript, Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics, was published by Duke University Press in 2020 and the Spanish translation in 2021 with the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia. It was awarded honorable mention by the Bryce Wood Book Award by the Latin American Studies Association. Kristina has also worked on the creation of soundscapes, street performances, photographic essays, graphic novels, community radio programs, digital storytelling platforms, and various forms of literary and journalistic writing.